non-sexual abusers -- short-circuiting joy

Digital Addictions Are Drowning Us in Dopamine...  from the Wall Street Journal, 8-13

Rising rates of depression and anxiety in wealthy countries like the U.S. may be a result of our brains getting hooked on the neurotransmitter associated with pleasure.

Deep in florescent-lit caverns media engineers remotely drill into your noggin to squeeze out every drop of dopamine until you’re down and dysphoric, fogged out and bleak of brain. That’s their job. They continually masturbate the entire population without touching them, seducing them instead with chimes and likes and all sorts of whacko affirmations. What we have here are blank-face zombies in all directions, and they want to eat your brains because theirs have dried up and blown away from too much screen-time.

Could a work of art cure this condition, probably not, but a house full might mitigate. Works of art stretch the attention span back out so a person can taste a well-prepared dinner, enjoy a drive in the country, or have a deep thought. Limit screen-time and reserve a little dopamine for the real things in life, outdoor adventure and exploration, family events and personal relationships.

Suddenly we realize we are all essentially on our own, each of us comparing what we see to what we already know, and social media has revealed how widely that varies person to person. Orwell predicted the contamination of language, debased as much by advertising as by politicians, and the notion that pictures can convey meaning and express commonality is reemerging in daily consciousness. Yes, art is antidote, the decontamination and recovery from all that digital diddling online.

painted mirrors -- the face we choose

‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, please tell me a big fat lie,’ is the beginning of a fairytale, but turns out it’s true. Nobody else sees what you see in the mirror even though the silvered plate glass is one hundred per cent accurate. Those shades and that pompadour do sorta make you look just like Elvis but no one else sees it, and that goes for whatever the rest of us think we see in the mirror as well. We look at least slightly different to everyone on the bus, and that pretty much goes for the rest of the world as well. Turns out that everything we see is rooted in what we’ve seen before and limited by the span of our own experience. We’re not so complicated.

Babies arrive as hardware in search of software, and they imprint on everything until they eventually adapt to their family’s values and conception of reality. In adult life a broader experience yields a greater perspective and a wider, wiser view of life, and many people love to travel, sample ethnic food, and read books that extend their own experience into new realms. Movies and mass entertainment can insinuate artificial experiences into our personal version of reality, and as our culture comes ever closer to the dramatized ‘escapism’ of our leisure time, maybe it’s time to make a few rational choices about how we see ourselves.

Art won’t fix things, it’s not a panacea, just nice to have around to humanize the house. The artist makes a design on a flat surface that engages the machinery of recognition and when that channel opens a person might somehow see themselves, and can even see straight through the art to the artist. When such a piece of art hangs in their house it becomes a reflection of their character and passion for life that never changes, that doesn’t wrinkle and age like the image in the bathroom mirror. A few pieces of original art reveal their owner’s true identity, and help to remind them everyday of who they really are.

visiting the zoo -- art in a museum

The difference between seeing art in the museum and art in someone’s home is similar to the difference between seeing wild animals at the zoo or roaming free, lions in an artificial habitat vs squirrels in the backyard. One informs the other, and it’s not difficult to imagine the caged cat would trade its fangs to be like the squirrel, living its authentic life. The art museum is also an instructional institution and should cover the gamut of what can be done with paint from the gothic up through the sudden rise of the renaissance, witness to rationality displacing the medieval mind, and forward to the non-objective irrationality of modern times. Drifting through the galleries it’s possible to let the gravity of your own interest guide you to the period and the style that most speaks to you.

This is information to take home and to look for among the artists who paint in your area. Anywhere up on a wall is the authentic home of art where it can participate in family life and recount it all years later when you’re old. Finding the appropriate art for your outlook and lifestyle is an automatic process and doesn’t require special knowledge. Just look at all the art you come across until a painting looks back at you, an eerie feeling at first and almost always a surprise. The piece you finally buy may or may not be tame, depends on the artist, but it’s probably willing to make friends for just a little attention now and then.

It will be a sad world when all of the wild animals have gone extinct except those bred in captivity, and when all the art worth having has been hung in museums. It’s good to remember that Rembrandt wouldn’t be happy in your humble house, and worth more than the entire neighborhood who could sleep at night, but the painting that was made in spite of having a full-time job just a few miles away could have just as much to say, maybe more, to someone like you.

There are three parties necessary for the practice of art. There are those who make it, those who buy and own it, and third are the fair-minded brokers who facilitate the exchange. Everyone else, all the administrators and experts along with the million dollar charade of stupidly extravagant wealth, aren’t really required. Somehow they’ve wedged themselves between the direct and universal expression of visual art and the appetite of average people for human connection and individual aspiration. Art as a vital component of daily living belongs up on the wall in houses where it can influence the lives of everyday people, and make the entire community more pleasant for everyone.

science and art -- are they compatible

Scientists claim they discovered the “gate of consciousness”
published tuesday in Cell Reports, “The findings reveal a gateway in the cortex where sensory information has to pass through in order to reach its destination (conscious access).” Co-author Zirui Huang is a research investigator at the University of Michigan Medical School. 

In summary, “Conscious access to sensory information is likely gated at a site intermediate between primary sensory and transmodal association cortices but the structure responsible remains unknown. We report results from functional neuroimaging performed to determine the neural correlates of conscious access using a volitional mental imagery task, a report paradigm not confounded by motor behavior.” 

They’re trying to say that out of all the stuff going on in front of you all the time you're only paying attention to some of it because something elevates it to consciousness. By some mechanism it crosses a threshold and you notice a ball bouncing into the street or the smell of coffee in a morning cafe. These scientists used a big magnetic resonancing machine to find out where in the brain that happens. No real application of course, pure science, but it’s interesting because artists have been searching for that same spot since way before what we consider knowable history.

Their technique is slightly different and it begins with a blank surface, flat and smooth. On it they create a design using colors in contrasts and intervals, and their purpose is to find that button in your head and push it. From all the way back to the beginning, the important thing about a work of art is its gravitation pull on the attention and awareness of the viewer, and its price at auction doesn’t enter in and even subject matter is secondary. I feel fairly confident the vast majority of all artists of all times, everywhere, would back me up on this assertion, we family.  

“The artist is someone who knows how to touch the pressure points in the humanistic mind.” I overheard that in a diner before the long dark road east out of kansas city, and he must have been talking about that spot.

an ex-president’s appeal -- the power of paint

I’ve started watching the late evening talk shows for the monologues at the beginning and skipping the celebrity guests there to sell a book or promote a movie, but held on for the former president, W, and his portraits of immigrants just published in a book. I’ve followed his art career from the shattered, penitent realization of the enormous responsibility he had taken so lightly and the wrong that was committed in his name, just guessing, up until now, when he intends to use his newly acquired expressive skill to influence the national mentality -- like a superpower.

As a painter he was awkward and unsure of himself at first but willing to endure the public abuse of art critics and comedians to bare his soul and expose his personal reconstruction, and such honesty and openness were at least disarming. His early paintings were approximate, sometimes barely recognizable, and they had a primitive almost child-like quality. His family and the world thought him addled and in psychic retreat, so sad, but he paid his dues everyday, you can tell. He doesn’t need the money and he’s famous enough already, so what is he after?

What must have begun as a psychic retreat, time to wrestle with what can be imagined vs what can be achieved on the ground level, eventually transformed into an avenue of redemption and an assertion of personal perspective. It’s good we saw the early stuff and don’t have to believe he came out of nowhere with this book. He’s a lot better than he was, and although he paints each immigrant from photographs, he also tells each individual story and his portraits say more about each person than their photo. He intends to use his portraits to humanize refugees and immigrants and to make them individually visible in the american mind. Art critics don’t need to be involved, and W is self-possessed enough these days to stand his ground with comedians, still has the self-effacing chortle.

From has-been buffoon to most relevant and seriously influential painter in america isn’t bad for ten years. Laura says ‘he goes to the studio everyday,’ as in at least I know where he is, and I believe her. Is he good, maybe not like those olympian color-field expressionists worth all the millions, but you’d have to say he’s taken charge, that he commands and the paint listens. I’d be willing to bet that given good health and all things equal he’ll be a lot better ten years from now, since now that he’s found himself again he doesn’t want to stop. Good for him, he’s bound to be happier but what does his most visible transformation say to the rest of us -- that character and truth can be expressed in paint, tangible and immutable, and we can all see it. Now isn’t that interesting?  

the persuasion caper-- art democratic

I recently received a six by nine inch envelope with the title: 2021 WHITE HOUSE COMMEMORATIVE PRINT in the upper left-hand corner. On the back a faux handwritten note cautioned, ‘artwork enclosed -- do not bend!’

Regular readers will be aware I’ve been out early about the resurgence of visual art as a major influence on the mentality of the world of tomorrow, and suddenly it’s today. Inside was a piece of quality card stock with a rendering of the white house, an image five and a half by four and quarter, and it was cleverly dated with the addition of two german shepherds standing at attention on the lawn.

The letter said, ‘This vibrant painting was commissioned by the Democratic National Committee from renowned artist Dan Kessler. It captures what I feel is the essence of the White House, that is now reinstated as a symbol of our enduring democracy. When looking at this beautiful print of the White House, please remember.........‘  and it goes on.


It probably was a pretty nice painting with a greater sense of contrast and depth, but at four by five inches it’s more of a smudge and a mite trite. It’s accompanied by an engraved ‘certificate of authenticity,’ which states, ‘This certificate hereby confirms the authenticity of the accompanying limited-edition fine art print. This print is an authentic reproduction of the original work of art. This image is a special limited edition commissioned by the Democratic National Committee.’

That's a lot of fluff for a postcard but it’s just a baby step, why make fun? Someone, actually a whole committee, decided the way to grasp the minds of their voters and focus their attention was by using original art, in this case several times removed, and then ask them for support. It was a brilliant notion poorly translated in a mass-mailing, but the impulse is based on a solid premonition. The significance of visual art in realigning our sense of connection and community is just around the corner. 


sixty nine million isn’t enough -- art that isn’t

‘This Is Going to Be a Billion-Dollar Piece Someday’: The Buyer of the $69 Million Beeple NFT on Why It’s the Greatest Artwork in a Generation  artnet news, march 12, 2021

It looks sorta like a flotilla of plastic refuge accumulating on the ocean or maybe a compacted street carnival, surely nothing very appealing and where is this thing? The last part is easy because it isn’t really anywhere and it’s not a thing, it exists as a digital conglomerate only. Imbedded in its grainy pixilation is an endless slide show of snapshots, a tar pit of blind associations. There’s only one thing interesting about it and that’s the humongous price tag, and ironically it's been paid for with crypto cash. It doesn’t resemble a work of art so much as a brazen swindle, and yet perhaps this transaction is not so different from the regular commerce in modern masters. Millions of dollars are assigned to replicated signature icons on a volatile and arbitrary, ethically-arid and opaque market. It’s all crypto.

This sordid media event isn’t really worth a busy person’s time and attention, and that’s the charm of it don’t you see? The image is so meaningless and the price so outrageous that the average person won’t notice the hand is really in their pocket and the art is being stolen from their wall. Just like your typical crime syndicate, the high-roller art market will eventually burn down the territory and rounders tend to abuse their golden goose if you know what I mean. Reckoning is in the air. The taxman has been sniffing around their phony philanthropy, and the dirty source of all that sanitized black-tie money, so civic minded, is also being questioned. As a sign of the panic that’s just around the corner, major museums have suddenly started casting excess modern masters overboard to lighten their liability. They call it ‘deaccessioning’ and over night multi-million dollar works of art, mostly by old white guys, start backing up on eBay.

They’ve finally reduced the notion of art to a financial feeding-frenzy over something with no material existence, so maybe it’s time to let multi-million dollar art just float away. Those huge paintings were meant for museum walls and not for houses, and their grandiose ambition comes through loud and clear despite otherwise meaningless drips and smears. Sometimes salaried artists at the university attempt to emulate some current trend and people who subscribe to art magazines may discuss, but self-supporting artists surviving out in the community don’t usually follow the trades, and there are reasons. For one thing those large over-powering abstractions in the museum look a lot less impressive room size, and there’s a museum in Ft Worth still trying to unload its easel-painted Pollocks, small, dark, and infinitely sad.

Any artist who makes the effort on their own, finds a room and buys their own supplies, most likely won’t have time to chase a mercurial sensibility in a luxury art market far away. If the artists working other jobs to support their art didn’t have a need and desire to say something to those around them they probably wouldn’t bother. With seventy million dollar bullshit being celebrated on the evening news it isn’t easy to even have their voices heard, but that’s changing. The artists have been here all along, but the public is seeing more of their work these days. At some point seventy million dollars for non-existing art won’t seem as relevant or as interesting as having a local artist or two up on the wall in houses all down the block.

cultural fire sale -- cashing in the masters

The current controversy in the art news is about art museums beginning to ‘deaccession’ parts of their collection, to sell off surplus masterworks moldering in the stacks when they might be converted into much-needed cash. This has suddenly become an issue for major institutions now that money laundering restrictions are being applied to fine art and tax-code revisions are on the way. There’s lots of posturing about respect for a sacred trust but with the flexibility to adapt to changing conditions, and it’s funny because it’s all bullshit. They can say they’re selling off old white guys to diversify, to properly maintain the collection, or to pay the help a living wage so noble, but they’re really just trying to beat the rush. They refuse to acknowledge that a glut of serially replicated masterworks seeking their own true level in an open market will lead to an entire system of value being wiped out, herds of ultra-expensive Rothkos and Pollocks going extinct.

Does this mean art will die, or just come down in price? If a painting by someone internationally famous suddenly drops from fifty million down to whatever it might bring against the artists from the community, side by side, it still might come out on top, but if it’s too big for the average house no one may want it anyway. Against a formerly fifty million dollar painting some of that local stuff may not be so bad, a little less stylish but with perhaps more to say, and given the direct support of their community area artists would get better and say more. Somehow I don’t feel sad for the establishment, rank upon rank of authorities and administrators floating away, locked in an airy castle erected by strip-mining the culture. Great while it lasted.

When it’s revealed that the painting bought at auction for an astronomical price and donated to the art museum is joining five others almost just like it already in storage and only two of them genuine, the glamor drains away. Fifty million dollars for a modern painting is stock-market speculation on a crypto-commodity, and this money-mill hijacking of art devalues and derides sincere attempts to find a singular voice at a level where average people live. More than that, this aesthetically-innocent, accountant-driven barter in trophy art appropriates and exploits society’s appetite for self-expression, but as we speak their pirate dynasty implodes. Major donors have been accused of humanitarian crimes, forgeries are being found out in the lab, and the minions are in full rebellion, wanting more money and telling dirty secrets, but worst of all the public is changing its mind. Instead of supporting modern art's grand charade they’re about to go looking for sense-affirming and world-verifying, locally-sourced and personally-relevant art in their price range and buy some.

some way out of here -- painted doorways

To utilize art, to make it pay back, to find its function in daily life it’s necessary to consider our own limitations and the barriers we have built-in. We’re prone to habit, actually it’s worse than that. Anything we come across goes through an extensive recognition process shuffling through stacks of images stored in memory to match up with what we’re seeing and give it a name. In familiar territory the sorting goes by too quickly to notice, but as a tourist in a strange environment it’s occasionally possible to witness a lag time figuring out the scene in front of you. Your search function has had to reach further to find comparative information, and sad to say, if no matches are found you’re not seeing it.

This might sound strange but examples abound. The old line coach sees things on a football field the average fan never considers and a horse breeder appraises characteristics of a horse no one else notices. It sure seems the world around us is as broad as our own experience, a box that’s only as big as the places we’ve been, and most who travel say they see more when they get home. If it turns out our minds really work this way, only recognizing what’s been seen before, then how do we expand our field of vision and become more aware of the texture and detail in daily life? This becomes an increasingly pertinent question these days with a population enthralled in transitory screen images, which, along with the monotony of rush hour traffic and the uniformity of many abodes, flattens experience and limits the range of our perception.

Art extends vision and depth of awareness by stretching what the mind accepts as truth, or at least by posing the question. Strolling in the museum a particularly powerful painting can produce a sense of vertigo as the senses recalibrate to accommodate its bold assertions, and chances are the sky will seem bluer and birds will be singing out in the parking lot. Most art doesn’t work so quickly, but people have it around because it enhances their ability to see everything else. At this particular time especially, art is an escape hatch from the sense-narrowing mass-media world we inhabit, and an artist’s vision hanging on the wall reminds us of how much there is to see.

old art, new art -- saying hello

from cnn, jan 13   A warty pig painted on a cave wall 45,500 years ago is the world's oldest depiction of an animal
It's now thought that the capability to create figurative art -- that references the real world -- either emerged before Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa and headed for Europe and Asia more than 60,000 years ago or that it emerged more than once as humans spread around the globe.
 
That’s a very old picture of a pig and it raises some interesting questions. More than tools or weapons, art reveals a higher consciousness, and this pig provides a point of connection, mind to mind, across the ages. Since we’re the first to see it, it must have been meant for us and even though we’re modern people with cars and telephones, we still see a pig. That says a lot about being human since any animal, bat or bear, that wandered into that cave since didn’t see anything at all.

This picture doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know already about warty pigs, they haven’t gone extinct, but it’s remarkably revealing about our distant ancestors, artists long before they made pots or wove cloth. Not just that. If some modern artist made a picture of a cow and time traveled back, these cave dwelling people would recognize it right away. This form of expression and even communication seems right for us since in our natural state we’re ‘sighted’ animals, with half our brain devoted to deciphering what we see. Very recently mass communication and its sidekick crass commercialism have made most of us more comfortable but also cheapened and diminished our lives, and loyalty to the home team has replaced more individual responses to our very complex existence.

It’s a freaky fact that humans didn’t lose the ability to create and understand figurative art until the twentieth century when a new regime of non-objectivity took over. Referential art of any sort was derided all the way back to the pig, and Simon Schama, knighted and renowned art authority, remarked that it was ‘such a feeble idea, to go around copying the world.’ Well he’s a heavyweight, he weighs down wikipedia, but wait a minute. This notion of accessing higher realms by abstractly applying paint in your own unique way sounds pretty feeble all on its own and its product isn’t real compelling. Maybe it wasn’t such a breakthrough after all.

The fact remains that a picture of anything isn’t likely to impart any new information about its subject, but through the act of depicting the world the artist is revealed. It’s not mysterious. The viewer compares their own experience with what the artist has painted and a conversation takes place. An example of a first line might be: I made a picture of a pig so that you could see it forty five thousand years from now and know that I existed. It’s not about the pig. Isn’t it remarkable that after mountains, seas, and deserts, civilizations come and gone, after forty-five millennia representational art still ends up saying essentially the same thing?

art recovers -- was never really sick

Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSBP) is a mental health problem in which a caregiver makes up or causes an illness or injury in a person under his or her care, such as a child, an elderly adult, or a person who has a disability. Because vulnerable people are the victims, MSBP is a form of child abuse or elder abuse.

It’s a matter of incentives and which side of your bread the butter is on. The US has a huge budget for art with tier upon tier of agency support and tax-funded ‘nonprofits’ in every community. Subsidized art is a major industry with blocks of real estate on college campus dedicated to a preparatory program that leads essentially nowhere. This entire bureaucratic dynasty is based on the lack of appeal of art to the masses, those duds who support uncounted careers in art, most without making any. Something fishy here, some element seems to be clogging the works, and it's almost like there’s an incentive to support an art that’s grossly unpalatable to average people, and desperately in need of life support in every little town.

For art to thrive there only needs to be two kinds of people, the people who make it and the people who buy and live with it. Agents who facilitate this exchange should get a taste of a self-sustaining, economically viable cottage industry and a clean contributor to community prosperity and well being. It should be clear that every person who draws a tax-funded paycheck to promote and support art has a vested interest in keeping art scrawny and underfed, ugly and unappealing, and they do what they can to keep those first two types apart. They’ll freeze out independent artists and flood their tax-supported galleries with a conceptual obscurity only a complicit insider could love. They justify their parking spots this way.

Their entire enterprise is sustained by the aspiration of average people for some form of honest self-expression and they step on the product and drain its nutritional content. I feel as much sympathy for them as they’ve shown artists who might have had a following in their own hometowns but for them, and for the society they’ve impoverished. Perhaps this is harsh. There’s not much you can do with an art degree in the real world and finding a regular paycheck from some arts agency is so much easier than trying to make art in a town where no one looks at art. Still, full recovery requires budget cuts and that means mass layoffs of people without real training and a purge of state agencies whose main institutional imperative has simply been self-perpetuation, so sad.

Art in communities everywhere is about to pull out the tubes and rise from ICU care, ripping back the curtains to feel some sunshine with feet on the floor and art up on the wall in houses all across town. There’s two or three artists around here, wherever you are, who are pretty talented and they’d get better with more time in the studio. If you bought a piece yourself you could follow their progress and maybe talk to them at an opening, on a studio tour, or when you purchase another piece directly. Art which couldn’t exist without government subsidies probably shouldn’t, and art that broadens and deepens your perceptions and makes you think is all around.